Released a new version of InstallPad today, tons of new stuff. InstallPad is a program I’m working on that helps you download and install Windows applications very quickly. It’s especially useful when you’ve just reinstalled Windows.

The source is now open, and there have already been some significant contributions. The license is an interesting one which took me some time to find/make; read more about it.

A few of the changes:

• Graphical preferences
• Alternate download URLs in case the main URL is down
• Picasa and Quicktime added by default
• Support for “installing” .zip files by extracting them to a configurable folder
• Launch only one installer at a time, so they don’t step on each other’s toes
• Comment applications

Still just one file?

InstallPad remains a single-file deployment (well, two if you count the applist.xml), and it doesn’t install itself anywhere. It is getting more and more interesting adding features to InstallPad without adding other files. For instance, a zip library comes with InstallPad, but since it’s licensed under a modified GPL, we can’t include the source.

So what do we do? A compiled DLL of the zip library is embedded as a resource, loaded from a bytestream at runtime, and the library is invoked via reflection; all this because we didn’t want an extra DLL sitting next to InstallPad.exe. The preferences file (installpad.exe.config) is also extracted to your application configuration directory the first time it’s run so you can have persisted preferences, without a (visible) extra file.

Go download and try it. If you find it useful drop me a line.